Communication networks may experience traffic congestion events. During such events, performance of data, voice, or video communications degrades and may fall below acceptable levels. In particular, traffic congestions are more likely to occur in military and commercial networks using data encryption techniques.
FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary conventional datagram 100 that may be used for transmitting encrypted information in an Internet Protocol (IP) based communication system. The datagram 100 includes an encryption overhead block 110 and a packet 120 having an IP header 122 and a payload 124. The encryption overhead block 110 generally includes an IP header 112, an encryption header 114, and an encryption trailer 116.
Encryption techniques commonly produce large amounts of overhead that significantly increases the traffic load in a network. For example, in the datagram 100, a bit length of the encryption overhead block 110 may exceed by more than two times a bit length of the packet 120. Correspondingly, limited bandwidths of the respective networks may prevent use of effective encryption techniques that tend to generate large overhead traffic.
Therefore, despite the considerable effort in the art devoted to avoidance or mitigation of traffic congestions in communication network, further improvements would be desirable.